A TV News Gumshoe Who Stayed on the Case

David Lemus, left, and Olmedo Hidalgo were convicted of murder.Credit
“Dateline NBC”

The crime fiction shelves in bookstores are full of tales of hard-boiled detectives unable to let go of an old case.

Dan Slepian, an NBC News producer, found himself filming a nonfiction version of that plot for three years, from 2002 to 2005. Then he became something of a detective himself.

Mr. Slepian chronicled the reinvestigation of the 1990 murder of a bouncer at the Palladium nightclub in Manhattan for a 2005 segment on “Dateline NBC.” Two men, David Lemus and Olmedo Hidalgo, were convicted of the murder in 1992. They spent 13 years in prison after their conviction, but their convictions were dropped in 2005 after new evidence emerged.

Prosecutors intend to retry Mr. Lemus later this year. (Mr. Hidalgo was deported to the Dominican Republic.) And while the original detectives have retired, Mr. Slepian continued to pursue the case on his own, often shooting new footage himself with a small digital video camera.

The result is the two-hour documentary “In the Shadow of Justice,” which will be shown on “Dateline” tomorrow night at 7. It is unusual for network television, and not just because of its length. Unlike a typical “Dateline” segment, “In the Shadow of Justice” feels highly personal, told without narration, mostly through the nearly 300 hours shot by Mr. Slepian.

“It’s really different than anything else we’ve done,” said David Corvo, the executive producer of “Dateline.” “We just had this wealth of material. There were enough twists and turns to spend two hours on it.”

The documentary does not dwell on the circumstances of the murder; it focuses instead on what Carol Kramer, the forewoman of the jury that convicted the two men 12 years earlier, called a “travesty of justice” in the 2005 “Dateline” report.

Mr. Slepian had not heard of the Palladium murder case when he started shadowing two detectives, Bobby Addolorato and John Schwartz, in 2002 for a report about the Bronx Homicide Task Force.

“At one point I said to Bobby, ‘You really must take this job home with you,’ ” Mr. Slepian recalled. “ ‘I really don’t,’ he told me, ‘except this one case has been bothering me for a decade. It seriously keeps me up at night.’ As a storyteller, that piqued my interest.”

The victim, Markus Peterson, was shot and killed outside the Palladium, an East Village nightclub, after a confrontation with patrons on Thanksgiving 1990. In the years that followed, Detective Addolorato said, the case gnawed at him, and he would sporadically revisit the details.

Interest in the case was revived in 2000 after The New York Times published a front-page article questioning the convictions of Mr. Lemus and Mr. Hidalgo despite the confession of a gang member, Joey Pillot, who implicated another man, Thomas Morales (identified in the 2000 article as James Rodriguez, another name he used), in the murder in 1994.

In 2002 Detective Addolorato, now working with Detective Schwartz, began formally reinvestigating the case, as additional news media coverage introduced new witnesses and put pressure on the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

“I’m grateful that the cameras were there, or else I believe the D.A.’s office would have continued to blow us off the way they had blown Bobby off for 10 years,” Detective Schwartz said.

Around the same time, Mr. Slepian began filming the detectives on their search. “There was a sense of discovery,” he said. “The detectives actually found evidence that changed the case as we were filming it.”

In July 2004, after interviewing Mr. Pillot in prison, Mr. Slepian approached NBC’s New York affiliate and encouraged the station to cover the case. Mr. Slepian produced the resulting reports, and Ms. Kramer, the original jury forewoman, happened to be watching.

Startled by what she saw, Ms. Kramer, a veteran magazine editor, contacted the lawyers and eventually concluded that she had helped put two innocent men behind bars.

In at least one instance, Mr. Slepian’s interviews presented new evidence. Mr. Morales wanted immunity in the case, but Mr. Slepian tracked him down and secured an interview. “I was able to approach him in a way that police didn’t,” Mr. Slepian said.

In January 2005, on camera in the lobby of NBC’s Rockefeller Center building, Mr. Morales said he had never seen Mr. Lemus or Mr. Hidalgo, undermining the prosecution’s attempt to tie the three men together.

In February 2005 “Dateline” broadcast an hourlong investigation, “Murder at the Palladium.” Lawyers for the convicted pair say NBC’s cameras helped illuminate their case.

“There’s no question that ‘Dateline’ played a role,” Daniel J. Horwitz, a lawyer for Mr. Lemus, said, citing Fritz Vincent’s testimony as an example.

Weeks before NBC’s report was shown, Mr. Vincent, the bouncer initially involved in the confrontation at the Palladium on the night of the murder, told a prosecutor that both Mr. Lemus and Mr. Morales “looked familiar.”

After watching the report and witnessing Mr. Morales’s speech and demeanor, Mr. Vincent said, “I was 100 percent certain that it was Morales” with whom he had the confrontation, according to court records.

Mr. Morales was arrested two months after the broadcast. (The charges were dropped in September 2006 when a judge ruled that the government had waited too long to prosecute him.)

Mr. Vincent’s testimony proved significant at a July 2005 hearing that led to the release of Mr. Lemus and Mr. Hidalgo. Mr. Slepian received permission to film the hearing, a rarity in New York City.

“This is a very immersive story,” Mr. Slepian said. “You’re in it, with the characters. You’re never going to get that kind of authenticity if you have a traditional broadcast camera and a boom microphone and a sound man.”

Mr. Corvo said that “Dateline” used larger crews for most stories, but agreed that Mr. Slepian’s access was enhanced by his sometimes working solo. “Being unobtrusive and having Dan be by himself probably opened a lot of doors that a three-man crew would have definitely closed,” he said.

One of the most dramatic moments in the documentary was filmed just a few months ago. On camera, Daniel Bibb, an assistant district attorney, said in an interview that he believed the men were innocent, even as he argued in court to keep them in prison — because, he said, he was under pressure to do so. Mr. Bibb did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

Mr. Lemus’s lawyers subsequently cited Mr. Bibb’s admission in a motion, later denied, to have the case dismissed. Mr. Lemus’s trial is scheduled for the fall.

This report, Mr. Corvo said, was “a little bit harder work than some stories.” But, he added, “My feeling is that people will stick with it.”

Correction: August 8, 2007

An article in The Arts on Saturday about “In the Shadow of Justice,” a documentary on “Dateline NBC” about the murder of a bouncer at a Manhattan nightclub, included incorrect information from the maker of the film, Dan Slepian, about its editing. While Mr. Slepian shot and assembled most of the film, it was edited by Rob Allen, not by Mr. Slepian.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page B7 of the New York edition with the headline: A TV News Gumshoe Who Stayed on the Case. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe